The present invention relates to a device for the arrangement, alignment, and correctly positioned feed to a receiving receptacle and/or a further processing station of articles of elongated shape randomly supplied thereto. Articles having elongated shape are to be understood to include hard gelatin capsules, soft gelatin capsules, rod-like tablets and similar articles and, of course, corresponding articles of wood, metal or plastic.
It is known that counting and drawing off of such articles causes considerable difficulties because, mainly, reliable aligning, forming and/or buffering of such articles prior to the actual process of counting, drawing off or other further processing is not satisfactorily possible with an arbitrarily reproducible result using the known means and methods.
Therefore in a conventional method the alignment or forming of the elongated bodies is achieved by causing the articles which are put into a hopper in an unordered fashion to slide axially into pipes penetrating through openings in the base of the hopper and therefore to be forced into the desired position in these pipes. In order to facilitate this process, the pipes which penetrate through the base of the hopper and which have a slightly larger inside diameter than the outer diameter of the articles perform a lifting motion. In spite of this, the efficiency and reliability of alignment of the articles to be achieved with such arrangements is insufficient.
The same is true for an arrangement for the alignment of elongated articles which comprises a supply receptacle, a conveyor chute connected to the supply receptacle as well as an inclined plate connected to the conveyor chute which has mutually parallel grooves which the elongated articles reach in a substantially unordered state. The grooved plate is followed by a perpendicular or inclined length of pipe such that a pipe is assigned to each groove. The articles thereby enter the pipes in an aligned state and are ordered therein so as to abut one against the other in the axial direction. The main difficulty in these devices is that part of the articles in general do not enter into the grooves but roll to the lower end of the grooved plate so that a correct entrance into the pipes is not possible.